I—not much in my line, I’m afraid: swimming before breakfast. I—I’ve always been a rabbit at games and things like that.”
The sergeant nodded, noncommittal. “When did she leave for a swim?”
“I don’t know. She told me last night that she was going to the Gap for a swim if she woke early. I woke early myself, but she was gone.”
“I see. Well, Mr. Tisdall, if you’ve recovered I think we’ll be getting along.”
“Yes. Yes, certainly. I’m all right.” He got to his feet and together and in silence they traversed the beach, climbed the steps at the Gap, and came on the car where Tisdall said he had left it: in the shade of the trees where the track ended. It was a beautiful car, if a little too opulent. A cream-coloured two-seater with a space between the seats and the hood for parcels, or, at a pinch, for an extra passenger. From this space, the sergeant, exploring, produced a woman’s coat and a pair of the sheepskin boots popular with women at winter race-meetings.
“That’s what she wore to go down to the beach. Just the coat and boots over her bathing things. There’s a towel, too.”
There was. The sergeant produced it: a brilliant object in green and orange.
“Funny she didn’t take it to the beach with her,” he said.
“She liked to dry herself in the sun usually.”
“You seem to know a lot about the habits of a lady whose name you didn’t know.” The sergeant inserted himself into the second seat. “How long have you been living with her?”
“Staying with her,” amended Tisdall, his voice for the first time showing an edge. “Get this straight, Sergeant, and it may save you a lot of bother: Chris was my hostess. Not anything else. We stayed in her cottage unchaperoned, but a regiment of servants couldn’t have made our relations more correct. Does that strike you as so very peculiar?”
“Very,” said the sergeant frankly. “What are these doing here?”
He was peering into a paper bag which held two rather jaded buns.
“Oh, I took these along for her to eat. They were all I could find. We always had a bun when we came out of the water when we were kids. I thought maybe she’d be glad of something.”
The car was slipping down the steep track to the main Westover-Stonegate road. They crossed the high-road and entered a deep lane on the other side. A signpost said “Medley 1, Liddlestone 3.”
“So you had no intention of stealing the car when you set off to follow her to the beach?”
“Certainly not!” Tisdall said, as indignantly as if it made a difference. “It didn’t even cross my mind till I came up the hill and saw the car waiting there. Even now I can’t believe I really did it. I’ve been a fool, but I’ve never done anything like that before.”
“Was she in the sea then?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t go to look. If I had seen her even in the distance I couldn’t have done it. I just slung the buns in and beat it. When I came to I was halfway to Canterbury. I just turned her round without stopping, and came straight back.”
The sergeant made no comment.
“You still haven’t told me how long you’ve been staying at the cottage?”
“Since Saturday midnight.”
It was now Thursday.
“And you still ask me to believe that you don’t know your hostess’s last name?”
“No. It’s a bit queer, I know. I thought so, myself, at first. I had a conventional upbringing. But she made it seem natural. After the first day we simply accepted each other. It was as if I had known her for years.” As the sergeant said nothing, but sat radiating doubt as a stove radiates heat, he added with a hint of temper, “Why shouldn’t I tell you her name if I knew it!”
“How should I know?” said the sergeant, unhelpfully. He considered out of the corner of his eye the young man’s pale, if composed, face. He seemed to have recovered remarkably quickly from his exhibition of nerves and grief. Light-weights, these moderns. No real emotion about anything. Just hysteria. What they called love was just a barn-yard exercise; they thought anything else “sentimental.” No discipline. No putting up with things. Every time something got difficult, they ran away. Not slapped enough in their youth. All this modern idea about giving children their own way. Look what it led to. Howling on the beach one minute and as cool as a cucumber the next.
And then the sergeant noticed the trembling of the too fine hands on the wheel. No, whatever else Robert Tisdall was he wasn’t cool.
“This is the place?” the sergeant asked, as they slowed down by a hedged garden.
“This is the place.”
It was a half-timbered cottage of about five rooms; shut in from the road by a seven-foot hedge of briar and honeysuckle, and dripping with roses. A godsend for Americans, week-enders, and photographers. The little windows yawned in the quiet, and the bright blue door stood hospitably open, disclosing in the shadow the gleam of a brass warming pan on the wall. The cottage had been “discovered.”
As they walked up the brick path, a thin small woman appeared on the doorstep, brilliant in a white apron; her scanty hair drawn to a knob at the back of her head, and a round bird’s-nest affair of black satin set insecurely at the very top of her arched, shining poll.
Tisdall lagged as he caught sight of her, so that the sergeant’s large official elevation should announce trouble to her with the clarity of a sandwich board.
But Mrs. Pitts was a policeman’s widow, and no apprehension showed on her tight little face. Buttons coming up the path meant for her a meal in demand; her mind acted accordingly.
“I’ve been making some griddle cakes for breakfast. It’s going to be hot later on. Best to let the stove out. Tell Miss Robinson when she comes in, will you, sir?” Then, realising that buttons were a badge of office, “Don’t tell me you’ve been driving without a license, sir!”
“Miss—Robinson, is it? Has met with an accident,” the sergeant said.
“The car! Oh, dear! She was always that reckless with it. Is she bad?”
“It wasn’t the car. An accident in the water.”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “That bad!”
“How do you mean: that bad?”
“Accidents in the water only mean one thing.”
“Yes,” agreed the sergeant.
“Well, well,” she said, sadly contemplative. Then, her manner changing abruptly, “And where were you?” she snapped, eyeing the drooping Tisdall as she eyed Saturday-night fish on a Westover fishmonger’s slab. Her superficial deference to “gentry” had vanished in the presence of catastrophe. Tisdall appeared as the “bundle of uselessness” she had privately considered him.
The
